Antonio Cerella

Religion and political form: Carl Schmitt's genealogy of politics as critique of Jürgen Habermas's post-secular discourse

Jurgen Habermass post-secular account is rapidly attracting attention in many fields as a theoretical framework through which to reconsider the role of religion in contemporary societies. This work seeks to go beyond Habermass conceptualisation by placing the post-secular discourse within a broader genealogy of the relationships between space, religion, and politics. Drawing on the work of Carl Schmitt, the aim of this article is to contrast the artificial separation between private and public, religious and secular, state and church, and the logic of inclusion/exclusion on which modernity was established. Revisiting this genealogy is also crucial to illustrating, in light of Schmitts political theory, the problems underlying Habermass proposal, emphasising its hidden homogenising and universalist logic in an attempt to offer an alternative reflection on the contribution of religious and cultural pluralism within Western democracies.

Until the end of the world: Girard, Schmitt and the origins of violence

Where do the origins of violence lie? And in what sense can our global age be defined as apocalyptic? In this article, I aim to compare Schmitt’s and Girard’s theoretical proposals about the origins, containment and diffusion of violence in order to explore the end of the Nomos and of its sacrality. My argument is that the ‘mimetical’ and the ‘political’ offer two complementary and radical visions of the origins of conflict and its containment. This exploration is not an end in itself, but serves to trace an alternative genealogy of world politics, from its tragic beginnings up to the dissolution of the political form in the so-called age of disenchantment. How to reconceptualize the chaotic multitude and undifferentiation triggered by the dynamics of globalization? What political forms will the communities take in the era of virtual liquidity? Analysing the work of Girard and Schmitt might shed some light on these epochal questions.

An alternative vision of politics and violence: Introducing mimetic theory in international studies

This article aims at introducing René Girard’s mimetic theory in the field of International Studies, identifying some of the areas of research that it might usefully open up. First, the article explores mimetic theory and some of its basic concepts—mimetic desire, mimetic rivalry, the scapegoat mechanism, and the sacrificial crisis—in order to highlight the strong heuristic and analytical potential of Girard’s work. Second, the article considers Girard’s contribution in light of contemporary theories of International Relations to demonstrate its added value. Third, the article serves as a critical introduction to the various sections and contributions of the Special Issue.

Space and Sovereignty: A Reverse Perspective

In this chapter, I intend to investigate the complex relationship between art, space, and sovereignty. In doing so, I analyze how this relation has taken concrete form and coagulated, as it were, in a crucial historical moment: the emergence of linear perspective that inaugurated Renaissance and modern humanism. Focusing on the work and the artistic relation—which has been defined as “the most important in the history of art”—between Masaccio and Masolino da Panicale, my aim is to show how, in the process of secularization, art and politics have been closely interwoven in creating the Cartesian–Hobbesian representation of the modern sovereign state. Looking at the artistic space, therefore, means exploring a ‘multidimensional window’, a liminal category, a crossroads in which space, sovereignty, and secularization intersect and reflect themselves into the aesthetic field, designing (and imposing) a specific vision of modernity and its epistemico-political discourse.

The obsession with perfect health

In the developed countries, the obsession with perfect health has become a major pathogenic factor. In a world imbued with the instrumental ideals of science, the medical system creates constantly new care needs. Yet, the greater the provision of health, the more people respond with problems, needs and diseases. Everyone demands that progress put an end to the sufferings of the body, maintain the freshness of youth as long as possible and prolong life infinitely. There should be no ageing, pain or death. Thereby, one forgets that such a disgust at the art of suffering is the very negation of the human condition.

Encounters at the end of the world: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and the Tyranny of Values

This essay aims at throwing new light on a decades-long controversy over the intellectual relation between Weber and Schmitt. This debate over time has been characterized by polar positions, with the “Weberians” who exclude any continuity between the theorist of Wertfreiheit and the Kronjurist of the Third Reich; and those who not only emphasize similarities, but also a true intellectual filiation between them. Without denying legitimacy to these interpretations, I shall argue that the similarities as well as the differences between Weber and Schmitt are to be found and located in the larger context of the crisis of modernity. Both theorists lived and witnessed the dilemmas caused by the process of rationalization, the neutralization of politics, the technocracy it entailed, and the emergence of a secular polytheism of values. The crisis of modernity – and of political mediation – is the background against which these two thinkers have shaped their conceptual tools but, as I shall explain, the intellectual weapons they used to address this epochal crisis are different. Between the Weberian “ethics of responsibility” and the Schmittian “neutralization of values,” there is an abyss crossed by an ideology: the political.

Postsecular Encounters in World Politics

In a late interview, published after his death, one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, looking to the future with an eye to the past, condensed in one sentence the historical and spiritual condition of his age: Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten [only a God can save us]. With this seemingly simple phrase, Heidegger cast a counter-image as intense as the one launched by Nietzsche’s philosophical cry a century earlier. For, the ‘death of God’ and his invoked ‘resurrection’ metaphorically drew the philosophical and cultural boundaries of an age suspended between construction and deconstruction, nihilism and search for a nomos, being (Heidegger) and nothingness (Nietzsche). It is exactly within this intellectual landscape that the analyses of those who have sought to rethink the thorny relationship between religion and politics in the ‘age of disenchantment’ have found refuge. Once the great myths of the ‘accomplished secularization’ and of the ‘privatization of religion’ had faded, the so-called ‘resurgence of the sacred’ – especially in International Relations – revitalised some of the fundamental issues of our time. In particular, the complex debate on the relationship between secularisation and modernity, religion and conflict, democracy and inclusion has been reopened and reconsidered in the light of a new ‘postsecular awareness’. This recent theoretical direction has been indicated by Jurgen Habermas who has taken a conceptual step back and spoken of the necessity of ‘postsecular encounters’ between religious and secular understandings of being-in-the-world, of ‘a change of attitude in favour of a dialogical relationship, open to learning, with all religious traditions’. It is around these themes and issues that the two works under review have been developed. They offer novel, alternative and illuminating insights on how to rethink the relationship between religion, world politics and global ethics within the new theoretical postsecular horizon. These books somehow represent the two faces of the same coin. Mavelli elaborates a genealogical deconstruction of the problematic relationship between Europe and Islam which, figuratively, opens the way to Barbato’s postsecular construction.